This time of year, everyone is pressured to bake. You bake the Christmas cookies, you bake a yule log, and if you haven’t baked that plum pudding...

Chef Michel Quissac is standing in a galley kitchen in an Air France A-340 Airbus, 30,000 feet over the Atlantic between Paris and Montreal. The corporate chef of Servair (Air France’s catering firm), Quissac is staring down into a metal tray of vegetable bâtonnets. He never actually utters the word “Zut!” but there’s no missing the crush of anxiety on his brow.

“The vegetables have gotten watery,” he says while swirling them around the container, “which means the sauce around the duck filet in the final dish will be diluted.”

He takes the elements of the dish over to Chef Michel Roth, who shares his concerns. Roth, the oh-so charismatic executive chef of the two-Michelin-starred L’Espadon restaurant at the Paris Ritz, conceived the dish along with five others to be launched in February for Air France’s business-class customers. He, along with Quissac and Servair’s executive chef, Roger Passet, flew from Paris to Montreal to test out Roth’s new signature menu.

It’s not every day you see chefs dish up duck, veal and shrimp in an airplane, but to determine whether the duck’s vegetables would be watery, the veal would become tough or the spinach underneath the shrimp might turn grey, this white-jacketed trio did just that.

Some eight French and Canadian journalists, including yours truly, were on hand to test the results. We weren’t expecting a replica of Roth’s Ritzy cuisine in an airplane, but the results were impressive. And the road from the conception of an airline dish to sampling the end result was fascinating.

I have travelled business class on rare occasions, but most of the time I’m that person in coach sitting in the last row next to the washrooms, near that crying baby, beside the snoring guy drooling on my shoulder. Lovely. Yet as much as I dislike flying for all the reasons we all dislike flying, I cannot deny I’m a sucker for airplane food.

I still recall that unexpectedly delicious penne Alfredo I wolfed back on an Air Transat charter in the ’90s, that awful turkey roll stuffed with green peppers on a bed of watery rice with insipid carrots I ate on CP Air in the ’70s and that indigestion-inducing hot pocket handed out on an Air Canada flight from London this summer. So when Air France invited me to come test its new menus on the Paris-to-Montreal flight, this closet airline-food aficionado was intrigued.

Airline food isn’t just something we all love to hate, it’s a huge enterprise. On a daily basis, Air France serves 250 first-class meals, 2,500 business-class meals and a whopping 10,000 coach meals on 51 routes across the planet. Think about it: That’s 3,650,000 little triangles of President camembert placed on that plastic tray each year. Whoa.

In an obvious effort to woo the business-class customer, Air France has turned to one of its country’s great strengths — food! — to up the experience. For the past three years, some of the country’s most celebrated chefs, including Joël Robuchon, Jacques Le Divellec and Guy Martin, have created dishes for both first- and business-class travellers.

When planning his menu, Roth said his first goal is to stay true to his style, which he describes as “evolutive classic French.”

Said Roth: “My aim here was to make sure the dishes had real, authentic flavours.”

Considering the shall we say less-than-stellar reputation of airplane food, does Roth worry his creations will suffer when he’s not around to make sure the sauce on the duck dish isn’t diluted by the vegetables?

“Definitely,” he answered. “There’s a great deal of trust involved. It’s teamwork. You have to create that complicity. We’re all giving 100 per cent.”

So what goes into creating a dish like, say, Roth’s stewed veal with verbena and vegetable fricassée?

“Every detail is a big deal,” Quissac said. “The timing is a big deal. The choice of dishes is a big deal. And with Air France, people expect more because we’re French. But a flight isn’t just about the food. A flight is also whether the plane was on time, if there was turbulence and if you received your luggage. But the business-class fare from Paris to Tokyo is 11,000 euros, so the food had better be good. From what we hear, people compare notes on the food in business-class lounges. That said, many people who travel in business class just want to sleep.”

When planning the dishes, Quissac says everything from the chosen spices to the food’s texture to being sure you’re serving crowd-pleasing dishes come into play. As does the way the food will be reheated.

I don’t think quenelles could be considered a terrorist threat, yet for an airline chef, such culinary catastrophes must be taken into consideration.

“Saffron is off limits,” Quissac said.

“Too expensive?” I asked.

“No,” he answered, “when you reheat dishes with saffron it smells up the cabin and bothers passengers. The same goes for garlic.”

As for ingredients, Quissac explains the choices there are crucial as well.

“If a chef we work with suggests a dish with deer or rabbit, we know he’s not the right person for us. We’ll serve those meats in first class, but we can’t use ingredients that are too expensive, too fragile or whose availability is limited. And the fish must only be sustainable varieties.”

Though happy to discuss the challenges of serving bouillabaisse on an airplane, the chefs become a little tight-lipped when asked about food cost. Though they will not mention numbers beyond saying the airline has upped its investment in food recently, they will acknowledge the business-class meal costs two-thirds of that of the first-class meal and the economy tray costs one-fifth.

All economy meals are produced with industrial-quality foodstuffs (ready-made, as in frozen vegetables), whereas business-class meals are a mix of ready-made and fabricated by the catering company (such as the sous-vide cooked veal on Roth’s dish).

For first-class meals, everything — foie gras terrines included — is made in-house and dishes are assembled on the plane, whereas dishes are reheated directly on the serving plates in business class. And we all know about those plastic trays in economy.

When asked whether there were any major failures over the years, Quissac shook his head then looked up and said, “Wait, yes, shark, we served it years ago on one of our Caribbean flights and it was considered too lowly a fish by many of the local business-class travellers. And there were problems in first class with dishes like pot-au-feu and braised beef cheeks that weren’t ‘status’ enough. Few opted for it, but then we changed the name to ‘mignonette de boeuf braisé’ and it worked.”

When evaluating the business-class meal later in my seat, much of what the chefs explained came into play. The lettuce leaf between the scallops and the foie gras on the starter plate was there to separate two dishes that were once served separately but then placed together to shorten the meal time (in business class, it’s all about lights out and sleep time). The shrimp on my main course was kept tender by a treatment in which they are first brined in salt water, and the red rice served underneath was ideally portioned: copious without being overfilling (overstuffing is undesirable in air travel).

Though the promised tarragon seasoning was too slight and the calamari was more of a garnish, on the whole, Roth’s “calamari with shrimp, lobster sauce with tarragon, red rice and baby spinach” (his favourite of the plates) was seriously delicious. OK, it wasn’t the last word in fine-dining, but we’re miles away from the pepper-filled turkey roll doused in brown sauce here.

Alas, this all-too-brief foray into high-altitude fine-dining was a rare treat. But for those of us unable to fork over some $6,000 for a Montreal-Paris return Air France business ticket, good news: The airline will soon be offering a series of five different food trays for those willing to go above and beyond the standard economy meal. Priced from $23 to $32, the trays can be ordered at the time you book your ticket.

Already, the option is popular on test flights, and Air France officials expect to offer this meal option within the next six months. It may not be the shrimp dish I lapped up in business, but it’s nice to have an alternative to that overpriced sandwich we pick up in the departure lounge, a little something to make that long flight less tedious and more delicious.